“I think they’re mad”: Inside a 48 hour battle to build the best video game

We send one writer to follow 20 teams of game developers as they fight …

Why would one coding team drive itself to the edge of exhaustion to create a fully fledged video game—one featuring badgers—in the course of a single weekend? Why would 20? We sent our man in Australia to a 48 hour "game jam" to find out, and he came back with an amazing 24,000 word answer. If reading this piece doesn't make you want to whip out a laptop and do something creative, you may be dead inside. Here, then, is part one of our three part epic, covering the game jam's first evening; parts two and three will follow over the next two days.

Those three little words

"It's all about the food," says Truna.

It's Friday afternoon. I'm at Queensland University of Technology (QUT)'s Kelvin Grove campus in Brisbane, Australia, where 120 amateur and professional game developers are about to undertake a grueling test of stamina, nerves, and sanity. In a few minutes, at 4pm, they will receive three words. Then, in the following 48 hours, they must think up, prototype, and create a fully playable game based on those words.

Truna is the mastermind of this little competition-cum-social experiment in how to break a human being completely. She's the Brisbane International Game Developer Association chapter's "auntie" and a design lecturer at QUT. It is no exaggeration to say she is central to the local game dev community. Today, she is giddy at the creative energy around her.

But as she gives me the tour before she officially commences the competition, her real pride and joy is the kitchen, where a mountain of two-minute noodles sit beside a bucket of instant coffee packets, a box of bread loaves, and several jars of peanut butter. The kitchen, more than anything else, hints at the insanity that will take over the two coding rooms for the weekend. As Truna points out just how many noodles they have, several teams enter with supplies from the local supermarket: chips, energy drinks, pikelets (a kind of Australian pancake), and candy. Carbs, caffeine, and sugar.

"Behind there are two showers," she says. "They're kind of warm. Ish. For the first four people, at least."

Not that anyone is going to use them. If the teams want to complete their games, they will be at their workstations constantly for the whole weekend. The event is a physically and mentally draining challenge on pro and indie competitor alike. "I think they're all mad," Truna says. "All of them."

But a little madness never hurt creativity. Game jams are not a particularly new phenomena—nothing fosters creativity quite like tight restrictions. Here, the teams have 48 hours to present a fully fledged game to a panel of judges. These aren't prototypes. These aren't proof-of-concepts. These are games.

And the prize for all the tears, sweat, and possibly bloodshed? No cash. No game developer job. A mug of jellybeans. So why do the teams put themselves through so much torture just to make a game? To find out, I'm putting myself through my own 48 hour challenge: to document the entire game jam as it unfolds, completing a draft of this article as those around me complete their games. It isn't nearly as grueling as the challenge facing the contestants, to be sure, but hopefully my own insomnia will come to mirror theirs and provide some insight into just why they do this.

The contest takes place in two rooms: the main room consists of 16 six-person "indie" teams made up of equal part enthusiasts, university students, and former students. The other room hosts the four "pro" teams—professional, hardened game developers from local studios.

iOS heavyweights Half Brick, creators of games like Jetpack Joyride and Fruit Ninja, are represented by a team of designers and coders under the flag "For Science!"

A collective of developers from studios including Defiant Development, developers of WarCo, Voxel Agents, Cratesmith, and Strange Loop Games are working together in a "Alliance of Indies."

Another eclectic group features members from Sega Studios, Three Blokes, and Last Level, are all working under the alias "Heinous Agenda" (named after the Facebook game four of the six team members are currently working on).

Finally, there's the team of outsiders called "Convict Interactive," who have come interstate all the way from Wollongong just for this competition. (You don't need to know anything about Australian geography to know that a place like "Wollongong" is far away. From everywhere.)

Teams are lugging in their computers and connecting snakes of wires to power points and routers. Some groups, with their own sound designers, have sound boards and keyboards and guitars, while others have drawing tablets ranging from mousepad-size to intimidatingly huge. Other groups are ready to work solely on laptops and Macs.

It's nearly 4:00pm when all the teams converge on the indie room for the announcement of the three keywords. It comes via video. Yug, of ManaBar and AusGamers fame, addresses the crowd. He assures the contestants that they are certainly mad, and that everything will certainly go wrong. "It's all part of the charm," he says. Then he announces the three words:

Key. Badger. Suit.

Teams are out the door before the video ends, piling into the sunlight, onto the grass, onto the stairs, already throwing ideas at each other. Others huddle around their computers in tight scrums. Teams want to be prototyping within a couple of hours. Time is precious.

4:00pm

Brainvomiting

Truna sits outside in the courtyard between the indie and pro rooms, rolling a cigarette in the sun. "Look at it!" She points over at team Rockin' Moses, sitting on the grass across the courtyard. Arms are flailing and pens are scribbling. "I love it," says Truna. "I love it."

"Personally, I'd make an adventure game," she adds. "We haven't had an adventure game in the competition since 2008."

I ask her why the developers take part in such an insane endeavor, but she brushes my questions aside. "You can talk to me anytime, darling. Go listen to the brainstorming. This is the most exciting bit. This is when the magic happens!"

Magic, it would seem, means "lots of people shouting random sentences at each other." Few teams are saying anything that makes sense. Instead, all members are just saying whatever comes to mind, hoping something will stick. It looks less like brainstorming and more like brainvomiting.

Indie team Rockin' Moses's brainstorming session.

I sit down with indie team Matchbox Battery, consisting predominately of QUT game design students who, like most of the teams, are trying to think of the most abstract descriptions of the three given words.

Isaac, who I am told is in charge of "particles," tells me, "We are thinking of 'keys' as in musical keys." James, one of the programmers, looks at Benn. "You'll be doing sound. You cool with that?"

In the space of about a minute, Matchbox Battery discusses procedural generation, Terraria with badgers, and an environmental digging puzzle. They reject ideas as quickly as they think up new ones.

"Make it all 8-bit" says Benn. "That will make the sound easier."

Leaving them, behind the building I find pro team "For Science!" I ask Murray, a designer, if they have any ideas. He sighs and shakes his head. "Man. I got no idea what I'm doing here. I've been crunching all week."

Meanwhile, two teams have hit up the university pub on the far side of the courtyard. Indie team "Well Placed Cactus"—consisting of students from another local university, Griffith—pour out ideas as fast as they take in beer.

As I sit down, a programmer named Chris enthusiastically blurts out, "Holy shit! This game!" Tyson, the other programmer, explains the concept to me: "So you are in an AC-130, but British, and you are shooting badgers in jumpsuits at the enemy army."

Kai, the team's artist, frantically sketches everything the team says, regardless of how absurd it is. "We could make it black and white. Noir. Like the badgers," she suggests.

"WW1 parachute badgers?" someone says.

They are still debating how to implement the word "key."

"How about the location? Afgahnkeystan? Pa-keystan."

"No, we are doing World War Two."

"It could be a quay! Like, a harbour!"

They all drink their beer in a moment of agreeable silence.

Jack, the sound designer, constructively adds, "We could have bullet time with badgers as they go into their balls and explode!"

"You could call it Inglorious Badgers," I suggest.

"Yes!"

The ideas are flying hard and fast, but I still have no idea how the game will play, and I don't think they do, either. Jack does some research on his phone, discovering via Wikipedia that there are nine different types of badgers.

"They could be our types of ammo. Hey! Sea otters are a type of badger!"

Everyone says it at the same time: "Torpedoes!"

Chris is practically bouncing. "Guys!" he shouts, "Let's go make this game!"

Edward Badgerhands

I leave them to it as they order another round of beer and continue brainstorming. Around the corner at the same bar sits the pro team Alliance of Indies. They are downing beers and eating meat pies out of a tupperware container. "I made 40 of them," says Kieran, a Cratesmith Studios coder, matter-of-factly.

Matt Ditton, convenor of the Game Design program at Griffith University and a producer at Defiant Development, is talking through ideas. "You are a badger. Burrowing down to get treasure. You wear a suit. You don't like dirt. ….You are a classy badger?"

Thoughts shift. People correctly guess that most teams will be doing badgers as the playable character, and they decide to shift away from that approach.

Kieran pipes up. "Jack Skellingtonkey! Professional safe cracker!"

Kieran is writing down notes frantically as the team brainstorm. Simultaneously, Matt informs me, Kieran's pen is recording audio of the discussion. Supposedly, if he taps the page with the pen, it will tell him what people were saying when he was writing that note.

"It's a great brainstorming pen," says Kieran.

The team returns to the idea of Jack Skellingtonkey. They are now thinking of three playable characters, one for each keyword. The key will be able to unlock doors and safes. The suit can talk his way past guards. And the Badger…

"He just throws shit down," says Matt.

"No," Tom protests. "Badgers are stealthy."

"Like an assassin?" asks Matt. "He digs the guards their graves!"

So it's a three-character bank heist game, but there's still a debate as to whether it is a Monaco (co-op 3 player) or a Trine (one player controlling three characters). The team is still debating this as I leave them.

On my way back to the other teams, I walk past Well Placed Cactus again. They call me over to hear their new idea.

"You are Edward Badgerhands! You suffered a horrible accident, lost your hands, and now your hands are badgers. You are going on this date with a girl, so it is a dating sim, but at the same time you must control the badgers and prevent them from mauling her to death while you try to sweet talk your way into her heart and… her birthday suit."

"I liked the old idea better," I admit.

I wonder if perhaps they have passed the optimal mix of ideas and beer, but they don't seem too concerned with my disapproval.

One Lonely Developer

Back towards the indie room, I come across a single guy sitting by himself at a table. He has earphones on and sketches casually in a notepad, occasionally stopping and just staring into the sky. Truna lets me know that he is, in fact, a one-man team. Ash is his name, and his team is appropriately named One Lonely Developer. His day job is making Web apps, and I ask him what on earth drives him to do this, by himself, on his weekend off.

"It gives me an excuse to just mess with art and code and to be forced to do what I love," he says.

He's entered the competition several times before, but never alone. Every year he tries to make a browser-based multiplayer game and every year his team pulls up short of creating something shippable.

I don't push for the story. I've heard of the competition's reputation. It has built new game studios and it has destroyed old friendships. Going alone means less voices arguing over the direction of the game, but it means a huge workload for Ash. Still, he seems unfazed and outlines several ideas he has to save time.

"I'll do the sound on GarageBand on the iPad, sprites will be sketched on my Wacom tablet and imported straight in to give it a sketchy look, and sound FX will be recorded on my iPhone in the recording mic."

Compared to the other groups frantically yelling absurd ideas over the top of each other, it's almost serene watching Ash conjure his game silently in his head and on his notepad, watching the sun set.

57 Reader Comments

If reading this piece doesn't make you want to whip out a laptop and do something creative, you may be dead inside.

Yes, I quite agree with you. Something like this competition would really be really cool to do... though my CS and graphics skills are both rather rudimentary... But this article is really fascinating -- I'm looking forward to the next parts already!

As an avid gamer for decades I love this piece because it has put me right there in the room as the action unfolds. As a musician I can totally appreciate what a very structured, compressed environment can do to bring out ones creativity. I am rabidly awaiting the next installments of this article.

This article has the spirit of so many things I've loved about Ars over the many years...

I've entered a few of these while at uni. Ours were always limited to three-person teams, but otherwise sound similar — the themes were a couple of random words, and the time was 48 hours.

I always found that we spent too much time on good tech and not enough on gameplay, which meant we didn't usually do very well. However, I took it as an opportunity to learn some new technology, so it wasn't time wasted.

The most memorable was one where the theme was Stealth. We came up with an idea whereby the player had to sneak into the girls' dorms and steal their panties, and we titled it Pervert. (Sadly, we were disqualified on grounds of bad taste, but they let us submit anyway after a quick re-theming and calling it Thief.)

We wrote in raw C and OpenGL, the latter of which none of us had touched before the weekend: we got a big book out of the library and looked online for tutorials. One of us did modelling, the other two did programming. In the end we came up with a first person game engine that ran natively on Mac and Windows, with billboarded sprites for 'enemies' (very kindly modelled for by some of the girls in CompSoc) and various bits of furniture scattered around to get in your way. As a tech demo, it was great.

Sadly, the gameplay let us down: we'd envisaged some stuff like peering round corners to avoid line-of-sight when planning your route, but it ended up more like trial and error: get spotted, restart the level, pick another path. Still, we were the only team to write a 3D engine in a weekend!

Interesting article Thanks.As a coincidence I was at the Mana Bar today, unfortunately it was a very negative experience. I had previously purchased one of these vouchers [http://cudo.com.au/gold-coast/pay-just-30-for-100-of-anything-from-mana-bar-fortitude-valley] which doesn't expire till Feb 2012. However the guy at the bar very rudely stated it was expired and I have to take it up with cudo. No explanation, no niceness, all questions just answered with take it up with CUDO. I'll have to see what Yug has to say about it tomorrow.

Great article. As a part-time electronic music producer, this definitely makes me want to go lock myself in a room with my laptop, Ableton Live and about 500 GB of sound samples and see what comes out.

We've been having this exact same thing at Philadelphia for a couple of years now - The Philly Game Jam. Teams from local universities as well as some AAA studios (THQ last year) compete. How come no article on that?

Well written article and I look forward to the follow-ups. I am curious to the code writers and if they listen to music while coding and what genre is their preference. I've always leaned toward progressive/uplifting trance to really keep me plugging along.

Any chance you could do an average age/student year for the teams? And where can I get some of that Badger milk that makes you big, strong and irresistible to women?